Simon Metz - Engagement Director

Over the years, Google has modified the algorithms to rank pages and weed out abusers of keyword spamming. Looking at SEOmoz's chart below Domain Authority and Link Popularity are the highest weighted elements of the current algorithm. The keywords in the link text and on page keywords still have  great importance (a combined 35% of the overall algorithm) but the idea that you can just have many instances of a keyword on your pages will no longer bring you to the top ranking. Among the elements on your site(s) that you must also address, beside the usual PageRank, relevant Meta Data, keyword density, are social media rankings,  length of domain registration and site speed.

As Google clamps down on link farms and scrappers who promote worthless content, it's even more important that you keep down the number of links on each page. Make certain that the link text and destination page are relevant to your content, and you'll be fine.

Many developers use CSS to replace text with custom corporate fonts and there has always been concern if Google considers this approach to violate their "rules". It appears now that the legitimate use of text replacement through CSS is not going to bring down Google on site.

Domain registration is now a component of the Google algorithm. The algorithm is looking at a number of factors to gauge the legitimacy and relevancy of a site's content. As with most of the components of the Google algorithm the domain registration as a mapping of the domain registration to the relevancy and quality of a site's content.

These elements can be:

• Length of registrations, multi-years are more trustworthy than one year
• Number of pages in a site, websites with only one or a few pages are likely to be less relevant or even keyword spammer/fraudulent
• Quality of the hosting company and or environment

Site speed is also under consideration as it may be reflective of the quality of a site according to Google. This is an addition to the ranking of sites that will cause a great deal of concern as small sites without dedicated servers and large bandwidth will suffer even though their content may be as good as larger sites. Google's Matt Cutts says that Google feels that "The web should be fast" and sites that are fast should be given a leg up in the rankings. Sites that are faster will lead to more productive searches and are ultimately better for the user, Google's mantra.

Matt Cutts makes a number of suggestions to see where your site measures in speed such as the Firefox Page Speed extension and Google's own user page to help analyze site speed for site admins.